Anywhere, that’s a powerful statement, especially to someone who works in IT. That could be in a cloud, or in a set of virtual machines in your data center, or even physical hosts. What if you could run Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Anywhere on a virtual machine or on bare-metal, anywhere, including your data center?

You might have read my previous blog where we discussed running Amazon EKS Anywhere on Dell PowerFlex in a virtual environment. This time we are going further and have validated Amazon EKS Anywhere on a bare-metal instance of PowerFlex. 

The good old days

If you are old enough to remember, like I am, the days before virtualization, with stranded resources and data centers with enormous footprints to support all the discrete servers and siloed workloads, you might be curious: Why would anyone go back to bare-metal?

Having been part of the movement all the way back to 2006, it’s a good question. In simple terms, what we are seeing today is not a return to the bare-metal siloed data centers of 20 years ago. Instead, we are seeing an improved utilization of resources by leveraging micro services, be that in the cloud, in virtualized environments, or with bare-metal. In addition, it provides greater portability and scalability than could ever have been imagined 20 years ago. This is thanks to the use of containers and the way they isolate processes from each other. Additionally, with a bare-metal platform running containers, more system resources can be directed to workloads than if the containers were nested inside of a virtual environment.  

This is central to the concept of a DevOps-ready platform. In the coming weeks, we will expand on how this enhances the productivity of native cloud operations for today’s modern businesses. You will find this on the Dell Digital blog with the title Customer Choice Comes First: Dell Technologies and AWS EKS Anywhere.

Beyond just the economics of this, there are scenarios where a bare-metal deployment can be helpful. This includes low latency and latency sensitive applications that need to run near the data origin. This of course can include edge scenarios where it is not practical to transmit vast quantities of data.

Data sovereignty and compliance can also be addressed as an Amazon EKS Anywhere solution. While data and associated processing can be done in the data center, to maintain compliance requirements, it can still be part of a holistic environment that is displayed in the Amazon EKS Console when the Amazon EKS Connector has been configured. This allows for monitoring of applications running anywhere in the environment. 

Digging deeper

Digging deeper on this concept, PowerFlex is a software defined infrastructure (SDI) that provides a powerful tool in delivering the modern bare-metal or virtualized options that best suit application deployment needs. The hardware infrastructure becomes malleable to the needs of the data center and can take on various forms of modern infrastructure, from hyper-converged to bare-metal. This has always been a core tenet of PowerFlex. 

When Amazon EKS Anywhere is deployed on PowerFlex, it becomes possible to optimize the IT environment precisely for the needs of the environment, instead of forcing it to conform to the limits of IT infrastructure. Bare-metal hosts can provide microservices for large applications, such as databases and websites, where a container instance may be created and destroyed rapidly and on a massive scale. 

The architecture

Let’s look at the Amazon EKS Anywhere validated architecture in the following figure. It shows how PowerFlex delivers a unique software-defined 3-tier architecture that can asymmetrically scale compute separate from storage.

The bottom portion of the figure consists of PowerFlex – storage-only nodes (1U). In the middle of the diagram are the hosts used for the control plane and worker nodes. These are PowerFlex – compute-only nodes (2U). On the far left are the admin and Tinkerbell nodes that allow for administration of the environment. Lastly, in the top set of boxes, we have the control plane, at the top left, that provides operational control and orchestration. The worker nodes, at the top right, handle the workloads.  

Let’s look at some important aspects of each area shown here, starting with the storage nodes. Each storage node contains five 1.4TB SAS SSD drives and eight 25GbE network links. For the validation, as shown here, four PowerFlex storage nodes were used to provide full redundancy.

For the compute nodes, we used two 2U nodes. These two hosts have the PowerFlex Container Storage Interface (CSI) Plug-in installed to provide access to the PowerFlex storage. This is deployed as part of the PXE boot process along with the Ubuntu OS. It’s important to note that there is no hypervisor installed and that the storage is provided by the four storage nodes. This creates a two-layer architecture which, as you can see, creates separate storage and compute layers for the environment. 

Using a two-layer architecture makes it possible to scale resources independently as needed in the environment, which allows for optimal resource utilization. Thus, if more storage is needed, it can be scaled without increasing the amount of compute. And likewise, if the environment needs additional compute capacity, it can easily be added. 

Cluster Creation

Outside of the Amazon EKS Anywhere instance are two nodes. Both are central to building the control plane and worker nodes. The admin node is where the user can control the Amazon EKS Anywhere instance and serves as a portal to upload inventory information to the Tinkerbell node. The Tinkerbell node serves as the infrastructure services stack and is key in the provisioning and PXE booting of the bare-metal workloads.

When a configuration file with the data center hardware has been uploaded, Tinkerbell generates a cluster configuration file. The hardware configuration and cluster configuration files, both in YAML format, are processed by Tinkerbell to create a boot strap kind cluster on the admin host to install the Cluster-API (CAPI) and the Cluster-API-Provider-Tinkerbell (CAPT). 

With the base control environment operational, CAPI creates cluster node resources, and CAPT maps and powers on the corresponding bare-mental servers. The bare-metal servers PXE boot from the Tinkerbell node. The bare-metal servers then join the Kubernetes cluster. Cluster management resources are transferred from the bootstrap cluster to the target Amazon EKS Anywhere workload cluster. The local bootstrap kind cluster is then deleted from the admin machine. This creates both the Control Plane and Worker Nodes. With the cluster established, SDC drivers are installed on the Worker node(s) along with the Dell CSI Plug-in for PowerFlex. At this point, workloads can be deployed to the Worker node(s) as needed. 

Cluster Provisioning

With the infrastructure deployed, our solutions engineers were able to test the Amazon EKS Anywhere environment. The testing included provisioning persistent volume claims (PVCs), expanding PVCs, and snapshotting them. All of this functionality relies on the Dell CSI Plugin for PowerFlex. Following this validation, a test workload can be deployed on the bare-metal Amazon EKS Anywhere environment. 

If you would like to explore the deployment further, the Dell Solutions Engineering team is creating a white paper on the deployment of Amazon EKS Anywhere that covers these details in greater depth. When published, we will be sure to update this blog with a link to the white paper. 

Anywhere 

This validation enables the use of Amazon EKS Anywhere across bare-metal environments, expanding the use beyond the previous validation of virtual environments. This means that you can use Amazon EKS Anywhere anywhere, really!

With bare-metal deployments, it is possible to scale environments independently based on resource demands. PowerFlex software defined infrastructure not only supports a malleable environment like this, but also allows mixing environments to include hyper converged components. This means that an infrastructure can be tailored to the environment’s needs — instead of the environment being forced to conform to the infrastructure. It also creates an environment that unifies the competing demands of data sovereignty and cloud IT, by enabling data to maintain appropriate residence while unifying the control plane. 

If you’re interested in finding out more about how you can leverage Amazon EKS Anywhere in your bare-metal PowerFlex environment, reach out to your Dell representative. Where is anywhere for you?

Resources

• Deploying a test workload
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere on Dell PowerFlex
• Introducing bare metal deployments for Amazon EKS Anywhere
• Blog: Customer Choice Comes First: Dell Technologies and AWS EKS Anywhere

Authors: Tony Foster

Twitter: @wonder_nerd
LinkedIn

Syed Abrar   LinkedIn

Introduction

Tanzu Application Service (TAS) architecture provides the best approach available today to enable agility at scale with the reliability that is must to address these challenges. PowerFlex family offers key value propositions of traditional and cloud-native production workloads, deployment flexibility, linear scalability, predictable high performance, and enterprise-grade resilience.

 Tanzu Application Service (TAS)

The VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS) is based on Cloud Foundry –an open-source cloud application platform that provides a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. Cloud Foundry is a multi-cloud platform for the deployment, management, and continuous delivery of applications, containers, and functions. TAS abstracts away the process of setting up and managing an application runtime environment so that developers can focus solely on their applications and associated data. Running a single command—cf push—creates a scalable environment for your application in seconds, which might otherwise take hours to spin up manually. TAS allows developers to deploy and deliver software quickly, without the need of managing the underlying infrastructure.

PowerFlex

PowerFlex (previously VxFlex OS) is the software foundation of PowerFlex software-defined storage. It is a unified compute, storage and networking solution delivering scale-out block storage service designed to deliver flexibility, elasticity, and simplicity with predictable high performance and resiliency at scale.

The PowerFlex platform is available in multiple consumption options to help customers meet their project and data center requirements. PowerFlex appliance and PowerFlex rack provide customers comprehensive IT Operations Management (ITOM) and life cycle management (LCM) of the entire infrastructure stack in addition to sophisticated high-performance, scalable, resilient storage services. PowerFlex appliance and PowerFlex rack are the two preferred and proactively marketed consumption options. PowerFlex is also available on VxFlex Ready Nodes for those customers interested in software-defined compliant hardware without the ITOM and LCM capabilities.

PowerFlex software-define storage with unified compute and networking offers flexibility of deployment architecture to help best meet the specific deployment and architectural requirements. PowerFlex can be deployed in a two-layer for asymmetrical scaling of compute and storage for “right-sizing capacities, single-layer (HCI), or in mixed architecture.

Deploying TAS on PowerFlex

For this example, a PowerFlex production cluster is set up using a Hyperconverged configuration. The production cluster has connectivity to the customer-data network and the private backend PowerFlex storage network. The PowerFlex production cluster consists of a minimum of four servers that host the workload and PowerFlex storage VMs. All the nodes are part of a single ESXi Cluster and part of the same PowerFlex Cluster. Each node contributes all their internal disk resources to PowerFlex cluster.  

The PowerFlex management software manages the capacity of all of the disks and acts as a back-end for data access by presenting storage volumes to be consumed by the applications running on the nodes. PowerFlex Manager also provides the essential operational controls and lifecycle management tools. The production cluster hosts the compute nodes that are used for deployment of TAS VMs. TAS components are deployed across three dedicated compute clusters that are designated as three availability zones.   These compute clusters are managed by the same 'compute workload' vCenter as the dedicated Edge cluster.   The following figure depicts the layout in the lab environment:

Figure 1. PowerFlex production cluster

The compute infrastructure illustrates the best practice architecture using 3 AZ’s using PowerFlex rack in hyperconverged configured nodes. This design ensures the high availability of nodes (i.e., nodes in AZ1 will still function if AZ2 or AZ3 goes down). A dedicated compute cluster in each AZ’s combines to form Isolation Zone (IZ). These AZ’s can be used to deploy and run the TAS stateful workloads requiring persistent storage. On the PowerFlex storage we have created volumes in the backend which are being mapped to vSphere as Datastores.

PowerFlex storage distributed data layout scheme is designed to maximize protection and optimize performance. A single volume is divided into chunks. These chunks will be distributed (striped) on physical disks throughout the cluster, in a balanced and random manner. Each chunk has a total of two copies for redundancy. 

PowerFlex can be feature configured optionally to achieve additional data redundancy by enabling the feature Fault sets. Persistent Storage for each AZ could be its own PowerFlex cluster. By implementing PowerFlex feature Fault sets we can ensure that the persistent data availability all time. Fault Sets are subgroup of SDS s (Software defined Storage) installed on host servers within a Protection Domain. PowerFlex OS will mirror data for a Fault Set on SDSs that are outside the Fault Set. Thus, availability is assured even if all the servers within one Fault Set fail simultaneously.

PowerFlex enables flexible scale out capabilities for your data center also provides unparalleled elasticity and scalability. Start with a small environment for your proof of concept or a new application and add nodes as needed when requirements evolve.

The solution mentioned in this blog provides recommendations for deploying a highly available and production-ready Tanzu Application Service on Dell EMC PowerFlex rack infrastructure platform to meet the performance, scalability, resiliency, and availability requirements and describes its hardware and software components. For complete information, see Tanzu Application Services on PowerFlex rack - Solution Guide.

References

PowerFlex InfoHub Documentation Portal

PowerFlex Product Portal